History’s Balabanlilar wins Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize

BY MARK PASSWATERS
Special to Rice News

Lisa Balabanlilar, assistant professor of history, is this year’s recipient of the Phi Beta Kappa Teaching Prize.

	LISA BALABANLILAR

Each year, students honor a nontenured assistant professor whom they feel demonstrates outstanding commitment to education in the liberal arts or sciences with the Phi Beta Kappa prize. The award comes with a $1,000 prize and adds another chapter to Balabanlilar’s already-interesting professional history.

”This is my third year at Rice,” she said. “I came here fresh from receiving my Ph.D. as a ‘nontraditional’ older student. I went back to school at 39 to finish my B.A., then a master’s and Ph.D.”

When Balabanlilar learned she would receive the award in an e-mail from John Greiner, lecturer in the department of computer science and president of the Rice chapter of Phi Beta Kappa, she thought the opportunities presented in the Department of History had helped her win it.

”I was, you can imagine, quite thrilled,” she said. “Teaching is very important to me; I see it as a vocation, and the classroom is a critically important component of my intellectual life. I think this is true in part because I have the great pleasure of teaching some pretty off-the-wall stuff because my department has the courage to let its members teach what they feel passionate about, rather than simply basic bread-and-butter survey courses.”

The topics she teaches range from the history of India and a world comparative history of imperial pleasure gardens to the rise of Mongol power in Central Asia and a comparative cultural history of the major Islamic empires of the 16th and 17th centuries.

Balabanlilar said that the interest and the engagement of the students in her courses also help her enjoy the teaching experience.

”It’s easy to teach here because the students are so bright,” she said. “They speak up in class, do the assigned readings and come up with original ideas — who could want better students?

“They are sincerely willing to be engaged and even excited. They will throw themselves into a subject for the sake of intellectual curiosity. They show up to learn. When I asked the students in my Central Asian conquest empires course to come up with class projects, one group independently did the research and built a full sized Mongol yurt on campus — it was, in fact, in the quad at Lovett College for a month or two.”

Though happy to receive the Phi Beta Kappa award, Balabanlilar was already quite content with her current situation.

”Winning a teaching award is a great honor,” she said, ”but just teaching here at Rice is the greatest honor.”